In networks comprising a plurality of luminaire nodes, it may be desirable to adjust lighting states of the plurality of luminaire nodes to correspond to each other (synchronization). Several techniques have been proposed to achieve synchronization of the lighting states of the plurality of luminaire nodes. Such techniques can be typically categorized into centralized architectures and distributed architectures.
In centralized architectures, a central master server typically maintains the state of all luminaires, e.g., by either directly controlling the lighting states of the luminaires or by periodically querying the lighting states of the luminaires.
In distributed architectures, the luminaires typically communicate with each other and indicate their lighting states by means of luminaire status information. The luminaire status information is then used to decide, e.g., on a majority lighting state of the luminaires to obtain synchronization.
Such techniques as mentioned above face certain restrictions and drawbacks.
E.g., for centralized architectures, there is typically a single point of failure in form of the master server—which increases the risk of downtime and failure of synchronization. Further, it is required to provide the master server which typically is a complex device and requires comparably high computational resources. This often increases costs and maintenance requirements.
On the other hand, in distributed architectures, it is often difficult to achieve synchronization with low latency: this is because the luminaire status information typically needs to be exchanged between multiple luminaire nodes. However, exchanging a large number of luminaire status information typically puts high requirements on the bandwidth of the system; while, on the other hand, limiting the amount of luminaire status information exchanged over a period of time increases the latency and makes the system response comparably slow. This typically results in a trade-off situation between low-latency synchronization and high-bandwidth usage. A further drawback and limitation of the distributed architecture is that for a scenario where there is a comparably large number of luminaire nodes, it becomes difficult to achieve synchronization for all luminaire nodes: This is because as the luminaire node density increases, the number of messages that need to be exchanged between the luminaire nodes typically increases quadratically. Thus, scenarios are conceivable where the latency of the system is larger than a typical time span during which luminaire status information remains static.